The first rule of sports journalism is: all sports everywhere are in crisis all the time - but especially baseball.

In baseball it's always five seconds to midnight, the Visigoths are at the gate, the sky is falling and the whole sport's going to the dogs. The cause of the current panic? Steroids. But not necessarily for the reasons that you'd think.

Editorial cartoonists love drawing baseball pitchers with huge, muscle-swollen arms. Or - even better - one huge, muscle-swollen arm. The assumption being that, thanks to steroids, the game is now played by supermen whose comical Edwardian costumes hide slabs of rock-hard beef. A trip to any baseball stadium proves this to be rubbish. Steroids might have aided innumerable pitchers to recover more quickly from shoulder injuries; they might have helped more than a few batters thwack their way into the record books; but they've had little impact on the sport's aesthetics.

Baseball is a beautiful sport played by ugly people. The tight uniforms that looked so sexy on the whippet-thin icons of the 1920s (Babe Ruth being a monstrous exception) look absurd wrapped around the wobbling arses of the Super-Size Me generation. Bow legs and beer guts (along with NRA mullets and German porn movie moustaches) abound while Peter Andre abs and Schwarzenegger shoulders are noticeable by their absence. Like darts and crown-green bowling, baseball is a game for wheezing pie-munchers.

The hullabaloo about steroids in baseball tends to focus on the fact that injecting yourself in the ass with 200 milligrams of nandralone docoanate every four days is a) dangerous, b) a rotten example to set kids, and c) cheating.

But the real reason steroids have caused such a stink is that it louses up the statistics. Baseball - more than any other sport (including cricket) - is neurotically obsessed with stats. For the hardcore fan, a baseball game's main purpose is to generate a whole new set of statistics. The baseball purist has more in common with the trainspotter and the obsessive record collector than he does with other sports fans. There is something vaguely autistic about the endless flurry of objectively meaningless mathematical verbiage that forms the bulk of any baseball TV commentary. Poets, novelists, painters and film-makers have all rhapsodised about the sport's inherent beauty - but this leaves the junkie-nerd fans cold. Screw the poetry. Just give us the stats.

And that's the real reason why real baseball fans hate steroids - because steroids render the statistics meaningless. And without the stats, baseball becomes mere entertainment. Except that it doesn't. And there's the crunch. Modern baseball is only slightly more exciting that snail racing. To watch baseball live is to watch a sport dying. Huge crowds sit almost comatose, despite the bursts of rock'n'roll hammering out of the PA and the exhortations to "Make Some Noise" flashed on the scoreboard. Attempts to generate excitement might include a T-shirt catapult, a hot dog cannon or a lottery with a giant bar of chocolate as a prize. But the crowds just sit there - not singing or chanting or cheering - bored catatonic and paying through the nose for the privilege (a family of four can expect to fork out $276 to watch a Boston Red Sox game - and that's not including money for gas).

A typical baseball innings goes something like this. The pitcher stands immobile on his mound, glancing sideways occasionally to check if anyone's trying to steal a base. This goes on for some time. After an eternity he pitches. The batter swings. And nearly always misses. Or he hits the ball behind the diamond. Which doesn't count. Or he whacks the ball, gets caught and is out. This is repeated (very slowly) again and again and again until three batters are out. Which is when a good proportion of the crowd scramble from their seats and try desperately hard to get drunk on $6-a-pop watered-down pseudo-beer.

If ever a sport needed drugs, it's baseball. That might sound like the sort of cheap jibe you'd expect from a soccer-obsessed foreigner, but it's a view that was shared by the greatest American sports writer who ever lived - Hunter S. Thompson. The good doctor's ESPN.com sports columns were recently published in the US under the title Hey Rube - Blood Sport, the Bush Doctrine and the Downward Spiral of Dumbness. And they kick baseball's needle-pocked ass.

Rube is Thompson on top form. Sports writers are dismissed as "a rude and brainless culture of fascist drunks" and "a gang of vicious monkeys jacking off in a zoo cage". Watching the Baltimore Ravens is like "watching scum freeze on the eyeball of a mule". And baseball pitchers are "as useless as tits on a boar hog and should all be put to sleep".

"I have not been to a live baseball game in 20 years," boasts the Doc, "and I hope I never see another one."

Now here's an odd thing: most American males over the age of 30 will parrot the line that soccer is "deadly" to watch. And yet every week throughout the summer, hundreds of thousands of Americans (all allegedly cursed with the attention span of hyperactive gnats) dutifully troop into state-of-the-art mega-stadiums to spend three hours (or longer) watching baseball - a sport so glacially tedious that it makes even the dullest MLS soccer game look like Topless Humans v. Gorillas No-Rules Roller Derby On Crystal Meth.

Baseball is the Emperor's New Clothes writ large - make it dull, and the mugs'll still come. Watching the Philadelphia Phillies host the Washington Nationals earlier this year reminded me of the scene in Dawn Of the Dead where the zombies in the shopping mall travel up and down the escalators and stare into shop windows. There's no real reason for them to be there anymore, but still they keep coming.

The love of baseball is a patriotic-sporting cultural reflex that has been hammered into the American psyche with a brutality that has at times bordered on the Stalinist. For generations Americans have been told that baseball is a uniquely and quintessentially American game (even though it was probably invented in England and the first known set of rules was printed in Germany). Thus the cultural loyalty Americans feel towards baseball has incredibly deep roots (even if the game is being rapidly replaced at youth level by all-conquering soccer).

Like America's continuing (and staggeringly illogical) preference for Budweiser-type mock-beers (when vastly and obviously superior real beers are readily available), baseball's continued presence at the heart of American culture owes more to nostalgia and inertia than it does to the quality of the product on offer.